The PALCI organization was originally founded as the ‘Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc.,” and was formed in 1996 as a grassroots federation of 35 academic libraries in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Today, we’re known as Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation, with a growing membership consisting of more than 70 academic and research libraries, in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia, and New York. Our partner institutions vary widely in size and mission. Libraries in PALCI have holdings in excess of 144 million and a combined FTE of more than 500,000 students.

Updating PALCI’s Mission, Vision and Values Statements

In 2020, the PALCI Board undertook an effort to articulate a strong and compelling future for the organization, empowering PALCI to continue to build on its many recent successes. The Board’s Future Framing Task Force interviewed PALCI members, evaluated consortial offerings, led sessions aimed at uncovering PALCI member needs, and made recommendations for newly articulated organizational mission, vision and values statements. This exciting vision of PALCI’s future was approved by the Board in October 2020, with plans for its implementation coming in June 2021. The new mission, vision and values statements are as follows:

Vision: PALCI is the trusted and preferred partnership for academic library collaboration and innovation.

Mission: PALCI enables cost-effective and sustainable access to information resources and services for academic libraries in Pennsylvania and surrounding states.

Values: PALCI operates on mutual trust. It is PALCI’s responsibility to continuously earn and renew that trust by consistently demonstrating operational excellence, transparency, innovation, and respect for diversity and privacy.

Additionally, the Board updated the consortium’s acronym, which historically stood for the “Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc.,” to now represent PALCI as the “Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation” with an intentional focus on members as active partners in a vibrant and diverse collaborative setting.

PALCI Program Highlights

• Resource sharing through services such as EZBorrow and RapidILL
• Opportunities for cooperative purchasing of electronic resources from major vendors, such as ACS, EBSCO, ProQuest, JSTOR, SAGE, Wiley, Oxford, and many other publishers and scholarly societies
• Ownership and access to shared eBook collections through consortial EBA, subscription and bulk purchasing programs
• Prospective collection development initiatives, led by our Prospective Collections Working Group to identify opportunities for sharing/reducing costs and duplicated effort
• Collection management initiatives, led by our Retrospective Collections Working Group
• Free reciprocal faculty borrowing privileges among select member libraries
• Grant and community-funded incubation of innovative ideas and new approaches including communities of practice, library infrastructure improvements, and open source projects that are international in scope
• Networking and professional development among academic library colleagues throughout the region

Member libraries enjoy an active program of resource sharing, cooperative purchasing, collaborative collection development, and professional engagement. If you’re an academic or research library located in the PALCI region, we hope you will join us.

To find out more about the benefits of membership to you and your library, browse our website or please contact Jill Morris (jill@palci.org) or 215.567.1755